Multidisciplinary economics deliberately uses the insights and approaches of other disciplines and examines what consequences their contributions have for existing economic methods, theories and solutions to economic problems. Multidisciplinary economists should be at home in their own discipline and meet the high international standards of economic teaching and research that the discipline has developed. At the same time they should be able to recognise the limits of economics and be willing to open up new horizons by following new, discipline-transcending paths on which new insights into the analysis and solutions of economic problems can be found in collaboration with representatives of other disciplines. As a result of this search, economic methods and theories may have to be adjusted in such a way that they take insights from other disciplines into account. They may even have to be replaced by methods and theories that have been developed by other disciplines.
This volume reports on the inaugural conference of the Utrecht School of Economics and the Tjalling C. Koopmans Research Institute. Its title refers to the objective of the new faculty and is rooted in the history of economics at Utrecht: it originated in Law, with economists attached to the Social Sciences, Geography and History. Thus was born an economics with institutional, historical and spatial dimensions. The naming of its research institute was natural in the sense that Koopmans, one of the world's most distinguished economists, was actually a student at Utrecht, but in mathematics and physics: he moved to economics later as a graduate student. In another sense, Koopmans might appear a surprising choice, given that Multidisciplinary Economics will signal to many a broader social science dimension. Yet Koopmans was more than general equilibrium theory, econometric theory and linear programming, although he was all these things: he had a strong sense of social purpose and was centrally concerned with the contribution theory could make to a better understanding of society, as revealed by Frankel and Sandoz (his daughters: as non-economists a nice touch!) and by Kay, in a thoughtful contribution on the nature of the market economy. Frey is another outsider providing a thought-provoking contribution: he takes the unfashionable, but convincing stance that corporate governance can learn from public governance, and in doing so uses psychology to inform the extremely narrow perspective of traditional agency theory. The contributions of further eminent outsiders, for example Buiter, coupled with those of the five, newly inaugurated full professors, Alessie, Garretsen, Kool, Schenk and Unger, complete a substantial volume of wide interest: the editors, de Gijsel and Schenk, are to be congratulated on its quality and relevance.
Keith Cowling, University of Warwick
"An important contribution to the field. Rich in ideas". ProfessorNoreena Hertz.
